How the other half plays

By Angus HollandMay 26 2002

'It didn't occur to me I would like it," says Philippa
Borland, a 30-year-old executive assistant from Sydney who is addicted to the
video game The Sims. "My flatmate was given it as a gift and I was sitting there
watching her play it and I thought, this is kind of cool."

The Sims is a
game that requires you to look after little people in what is essentially a
computer version of a doll's house. You cook virtual meals, perform virtual
housework and take characters to a virtual toilet. Surely if you wanted to do
that, you'd get a job in a nursing home?

But, along with millions of men and
women around the world, Borland has bought her own copy, and every expansion
pack (extra episodes) released since. "I don't play every day," she says, "but
when I do, I play for quite a few hours." Its appeal, says Borland, is simple.
"You can talk to people and have relationships."

Like many women, Borland is
uninterested in most video games. "I don't like spending all my time killing
things," she says, neatly summing up the raison d'etre of most software titles.
But she, and millions of female Sim players around the world, disprove the
common belief that girls and women are simply not interested in gaming. Type
"The Sims" into Google and it registers 2,150,000 websites, many of them run by
female fans eager to exchange tips on, among other things, the art of Sim
flirting: "Make sure your Sim has a bath just before making the date," suggests
one gamer. "Sweaty armpits are a turnoff."

Guys are pretty easy to figure
out. They like fighting. They like fast cars. They like improbably proportioned
girls. By and large, designing video games for guys does not require an enormous
amount of imagination.");document.write("

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Girls are a bit more complicated. Despite countless
research projects into women's needs, and success stories such as The Sims,
video game makers still aren't sure what female gamers want. They all know it's
a market with enormous potential: "female" software currently makes up less
than one per cent of the total video game industry, which last year made close
to $20 billion, more than Hollywood takes at the box office.

Success in this
new market will require some deep thought about such fundamental issues as
gender and stereotyping, and even the definition of games themselves. A tall
order for a bunch of guys (and they are mostly guys) whose toughest assignment
to date has been making female kickboxers' breasts bounce
realistically.

"There is no denying that there are more male programmers than
female ones," says Punya Mishra, assistant professor in learning technology and
culture at Michigan State University. "Thus the kinds of games that are designed
tend to be those that appeal to males. These games emphasise competition,
control and violence, something that rarely appeals to girls and women, who tend
to prefer collaboration and communication, aesthetics and imagery."

Trying
to break the mould, the company Purple Moon spent four years researching the
female gamer market. Its founder, Brenda Laurel, wanted to encourage girls to
feel comfortable around computers, which could eventually lead them into the IT
industry† (many males in computing say they were first attracted by the
games). After interviewing thousands of girls, Purple Moon spent $80 million
developing eight carefully targetted and critically well-received video games
and promptly collapsed, riddled with internal disputes.

"The feminist ideal
of collaboration is not a great recipe for getting things done," Laurel wrote
after Purple Moon sacked all its staff in early 1999. "Without a clear authority
structure, a faux-flat organisation forces people to resort to underworld secret
alliances and covert organisations in order to exercise personal power. Such an
organisation can expend far too much energy on the complexities of its emotional
and personal life."

Purple Moon was eventually swallowed up by Mattel,
whose Barbie character still dominates the girl gamer market. As one commentator
wrote at the time: "It might be a case of good-for-you 'girl-positive'
earnestness falling flat on its face in front of frivolous, mainstream
fun."

If focusing exclusively on females led Purple Moon into the same
gender minefield as the developers producing violent trash for boys, could the
secret to success be sidestepping the issue of gender altogether?

"We just
want a good game," says Sue Morris, a Queenslander currently completing her PhD
on the online first-person shooter scene (a particular form of combat game often
played in teams). She's writing from experience — Morris used to play regularly,
even competing in tournaments, and often surprised her opponents when she
revealed she was female.

"From childhood I was always into games — board
games, pinball, then Space Invaders," she says. "Then my boyfriend introduced
me to Doom 2 (a first-person shooter) in 1995. I liked the challenge and I
really got into the social side of it. There's a sense of satisfaction of
competing against other people. You can learn a lot about a person by playing a
game against them. Some hide out and snipe, others like running around in the
middle of things with shotguns."

Morris has also enjoyed The Sims, but
decided, "I've got enough to do with my own life without having to take cartoon
characters to the toilet. My boyfriend sat there for a week doing virtual
housework while his room was a mess."

She believes it's not so much the
games themselves that include or exclude women — "a game is good or bad, like a
film is good or bad" — rather, it's usually the fault of the marketing and
packaging. Video game magazines focus on the blood and gore and use lascivious
screenshots as soft-core centrefolds, a strong message that this is the domain
of the adolescent male. Games shops have a nerdy, stinky-boys-bedroom
atmosphere.

"A lot of games can seem as if they're just for guys," says Morris.
"Women are required to make a stretch to get into games."

You could draw a parallel with Hollywood, where the portrayal of female
characters and obsession with special effects and violence appears aimed
squarely at teenage males, one of the biggest markets. And there's a good reason
why female characters in video games look like they've been created to appeal to
sex-crazed adolescent boys. "They were designed for sex-crazed adolescent
boys," laughs Queensland University games researcher Daniel Johnson. "Most game
development companies shy away from developing for females because no one is
really sure how large the market is for that demographic and there are far safer
moves that can be made — creating yet another first-person shooter for
example."

Yet with literally thousands of titles on the market, there are
still hundreds that would appeal to female gamers, he says. "The issue is not
that there are not enough games that girls would like. It is that they are not
encouraged to explore games as an alternative leisure activity. I have never had
a girlfriend who didn't end up getting sucked in to one game or another,
eventually. The tricky part is to get them to try the games in the first
place."

Johnson believes the way forward is to rid gaming of its complicated
interfaces: computer keyboards and the multi-button controllers of consoles are
off-putting for novices, he says. His research shows that novice gamers
(especially girls) are far more attracted to games that employ what he calls
"physically implemented peripherals", controllers that resemble fishing rods,
guns, snowboards, dance mats.

Remember Frogger and Space Invaders? Everybody
played those, girls as much as guys. They were easy to play — two buttons and a
stick — and played in social environments such as pubs and arcades.

But when
games moved to the personal computer, much of that accessibility disappeared.
They were the sole domain of the nerdy male, at least in the early days, and the
games reflected that: slavishly real flight simulators, "God" simulations,
mildly pornographic role-playing and the game regarded as the granddaddy of them
all, 1992's Wolfenstein 3D — a gory shoot 'em up. Soon the market was filled
with "bleed and twitch" titles.

There was a spark of life when Eidos
released Tomb Raider in 1996. Somehow it managed to appeal to both sexes — women
liked having a powerful female, Lara Croft, as the main character; guys liked
Lara's comely figure. (Incidentally, the actor who played Lara in the movie,
Angelina Jolie, reportedly divorced her first husband after he became a Tomb
Raider addict, spending more time with Lara than her.)

And like The Sims,
1993's Myst, a fantasy about escaping from a beautifully rendered island, was
gender-neutral. An intellectual game that relied on puzzle solving rather than
action, it is derided by many (male) gamers as boring — but that didn't stop it
selling 3.5 million copies to become one of the biggest sellers of all time.

THQ's Britney's Dance Beat, about to be released in Australia on several
console systems, also claims to be gender-neutral. It's more of a video clip
than a straight-out game and, if users so desire, can be played with a dance mat
that will apparently teach you to dance like the mega-poppet herself. All deeply
unthreatening to female gamers, you'd think.

"This type of game play really
sets female and male players on even ground," says head producer Jamie Bafus.
"The style doesn't fall into a typical male or female play pattern, so it's an
even match and girls can feel very confident in their abilities. We also feature
non-traditional elements such as the immersive video and behind-the-scenes video
content, which makes the game an all-round entertainment product rather than a
traditional video game."

(It also features the gyrating Britney, which led
one US reviewer to observe: "The feminist camp might say this game is nothing
more than a scantily clad woman-child that men can control with a few
buttons.")

For millions of girls, though, the whole discussion about
computer literacy, sex objects and role models is moot. They already use
computers, often for hours every day. They play games, they chat to their
friends, they buy and sell things in auction rooms, they read stockmarket
reports. They are the community at www.NeoPets.com, a website that could be
called a next-generation gaming experience. NeoPets claims 31,070,103 registered
users from around the world, 57 per cent of them female. Another 50,000 sign up
every day.

It's hard to describe everything that the site does (take a look
yourself) but it's basically a virtual world where you adopt and nurture a pet,
feed it, dress it, and enter it in competitions. Succeed and your pet will
flourish and you'll have money to spend; pay less attention and your pet will
suffer — like poor Bongo3400, a blue Pteri bird created for the purposes of this
story, who is listed as "dying" even though I fed him a jar of olives just the
other week.

It's a bit like the tamagochi craze of a couple of years back,
except the site also acts as a giant chat room and eBay-style auction house
(where you can bid for such items as pink sprinkle doughnuts using the currency
of Neopia, neopoints). Users form their own guilds and trawl for new members.
You can approach other Neopians to become your friend, or reject advances
yourself. The currency fluctuates in line with the Neopian stock market and
there's a local paper. There are no human characters, so no issues of gender, no
violence, no sex (bar a little teenage double entendre in the monitored chat
rooms) and enough activities to interest any visitor, even adults.

"I play
every Monday, Thursday and Saturday or Sunday," says Myra, a 12-year-old who
has visited the site for over a year and maintains two neopets. "I like making
lots of neofriends in different countries. I usually go on to chat. I don't like
action games, but I do like The Sims."

Since its formal opening in November
1999, Neopets.com has become one of the most popular entertainment sites on the
Web.

But even in a virtual paradise like this there's a catch. While it's
free for the users, it makes money for its hosts, thanks to an ingenious
marketing system: advertisers pay to feature their products in the Neopian
shops. The object of one game was to prevent a beast's teeth from falling out by
brushing with a new Crest toothbrush — a form of advertising that has drawn
criticism from Ralph Nader's consumer group. "It is a game and a chatroom and a
virtual pet," says Michigan State University's Punya Mishra, "and let us not
forget, a marketing device. What it is selling is your eyeballs to
advertisers."